BACKGROUND Construction workers have a substantial risk of developing irritant and/or allergic contact dermatitis. Unfortunately, however, there is little population-based epidemiological data relating to occupational skin diseases (OSD) in the European construction industry that allow assessment of preventive measures. OBJECTIVES In this investigation, the yearly incidence rates and causes o...

We study the problem of detecting and counting simultaneous, overlapping speakers in a multichannel, distant-microphone scenario. Focusing on supervised learning approach, we treat Voice Activity Detection (VAD), Overlapped Speech (OSD), joint VAD OSD (VAD+OSD) speaker unified way, as instances general Counting (OSDC) multi-class problem. consider Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) Transforme...

The network bottleneck incurred by big data process and transfer has increasingly become a severe problem in today's data center and cloud storage. Exploring and exploiting the advantages of both the scalable object storage architecture and intelligent active storage technology are one of the ways to address this challenge. In this talk, we present the design and performance evaluation of Oasis...

The orthotropic steel deck (OSD) has been utilized successfully for thousands of bridges worldwide; however, fatigue cracking of the OSD has been observed frequently due to the complicated welded details combined with stresses that can be difficult to quantify, and the uncertainties in fatigue damage accumulation. In this paper, a fatigue reliability assessment method is proposed based on a com...

Comprehensive gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC×GC-MS) provides a different perspective in metabolomics profiling of samples. However, algorithms for GC×GC-MS data processing are needed in order to automatically process the data and extract the purest information about the compounds appearing in complex biological samples. This study shows the capability of independent component analysis...

BACKGROUND Job satisfaction and burnout have been recurring problems amongst nurses in the Republic of South Africa (RSA). As a result, nurses are still leaving the rural public sector in search of lucrative work at the urban and private sectors and in developed countries. Accordingly, Occupational Specific Dispensation (OSD) was introduced as a strategy to ircumvent the problem. However, since...

Previous research has confirmed that most university tutors are using virtual learning environments (VLE’s) to simply distribute course materials rather than to build on the learning generated in face to face interactions. Unless VLE’s are actually used to enhance the learning of the student over traditional face to face interactions, they remain merely a virtual environment. The purpose of thi...